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Can Canonical's Landscape systems management tool be used to manage (in whole or in part) Ubuntu-derived distros? In particular, Linux Mint? My hope is that there's enough similarities to allow Landscape to work.

Thanks for the help!

FYI This post is asking about the capabilities of Canonical's Landscape service. I feel this forum is the appropriate place to ask these questions and, judging by the number of Landscape questions already listed, most everyone else does too. It is misguided to simply seize upon the use of the name of another distro and throw the whole post out the window. Oh! Wait! He mentioned Windows now... better ban for sure now.

0xF2
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Travis
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2 Answers2

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You might be able to find landscape-client for mint, however, do you really want to? The system is able to find and detect packages that are needed among other tasks. But without using official ubuntu repos, would you want Ubuntu telling you what you should install?

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tl;dr: it might work, but you're completely on your own, despite having to pay for a seat.

Landscape-client does not explicitly check that it is running on Ubuntu, however it assumes it does. In other words, absolutely no effort is made by Canonical to test or otherwise support other distributions, but it might work (I personally see no technical reason why it wouldn't, but never tried).

As far as packages go, it should be no problem as Landscape already handles i.e. PPA packages or private repositories quite well.

Needless to say, running landscape client on a non-Ubuntu machines is not recommended and not supported for the following reasons:

  • Absolutely no testing is done on non-Ubuntu distributions. A lot of testing goes into making sure it works perfectly on Ubuntu, however.
  • Features are developed assuming Ubuntu (dependencies are expected to be Ubuntu's for example)
  • You'll still need to use up a Landscape seat (which costs money)
  • Bugs open against other distributions are likely to be "won't fixe'd".
Tribaal
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